Feedback Open letter to the Admin and Dev team

[Cal]

It feels like some admins take a strong standpoint on their views and how it should affect the servers, and this leads to ostracization of community members and pushes a further divide between players and admins to the point where people are scared to talk against admins for fear of being banned

For clarification, we have not nor will ever ban people for simply speaking their mind on our server. If someone *perceives* their ban as being for ‘speaking up’ they were very likely for the hundredth time making a jab at our admin/dev team and received a final warning already.

We as a community are forced to only take the banned parties word as when asking an admin we are told that its “Not their place to hand it out” and whilst this is understandable it leads to massive misunderstandings between the community and the admin team and causes more flak for the admin team than if they had public ban reasons.

We privated ban appeals because we care about the privacy of the banned person. If they want to make something up about their ban to share with others that's on them, we don't want players being judged (and laughed at) by the community. It was not a decision that was made lightly and it will not be reversed. As it stands, we're seeing more people appeal in general.

Here is the news post about the ban-appeal-privating for reference: https://discord.com/channels/18224996089...7556051005

As it stands I see no downside to having public ban reasons, it forces proper documentation and creates a permanent standard of what is and isn’t rule breaking behaviour that anyone can browse.

The downside is how - straight up - creepy and obsessive players got about them. We had people making RSS feeds to alert them when a ban appeal was posted. We don’t want that for us and we don’t want that for you.  As for "a standard of what is and isn't rule breaking behavior" - We have a page of rules. Most people end up banned because they can’t stop breaking rules, or time and time again bend them as hard as they can. We do not give out endless warnings, and we’re not going to tolerate people harassing our players or us.

The divide between RP and Classic leads to a rift within the community, not only when it comes to general conversation but it creeps into balance and PR discussion a lot also. This can be seen mainly on the forums where a majority of the discussions boil down to RP vs Classic and how an item/antag would have to be balanced for both and how admins don't want Classic or RP deviating too much from one another.

The consensus we came to on this is that we try to make changes work for both servers because it's a huge amount more to try to maintain something in two separate ways.

I genuinely have not seen "An item/antag would have to be balanced for one or the other" as this is legitimately one of the easiest things to do, we can exclude rampage-y antagonists from the RP gamemode.

What we don't like to see, that we DO see is "grr squicky RP players made this change happen" as this is almost NEVER the case. There is no genuine "rift" between the community. be good to your fellow player.

And this mindset really hurts the chance for any major developments within the codebase. During my two years in the community the few changes or added content I can name off the top of my head is the Wraith rework, Nadir and Flock getting finished.

You’re focusing on things you personally see that affect you.

We just had a group effort of Say code being refactored, that’s gigantic. We just had a bunch of object critters converted to mobs, that’s gigantic, we just had Parallax implemented, that’s gigantic. We had the Nuclear Engine added, enormous changes.

Sure, it isn’t a brand new antagonist (Of which we ALSO added two that you did not list - Arcfiend and Salvagers) or a brand new map (Decarabia is WIP.) but they are giant steps towards making the game better.

The severe lack of transparency hurts the community a lot. We are often the last to know about the developments and changes and are often just surprised with admin decisions and are usually left wondering what happened or what was decided on.

Going to be blunt here - Players aren’t obligated to know about our developments or changes, we’d never get anything done. We aren’t a giant game company or whatever, but imagine if Capcom had all of their work on public display, or asked their community feedback on every little thing. NOTHING would ever get done. Not everyone agrees on things, and devs communicating to other devs know the game systems well and how they interact, as well as are considering balance implications instead of how cool something is.

Admins do not communicate enough with the playerbase, in regards to their decisions within PRs and bans. This lack of transparency harbours with it a distinct lack of accountability and responsibility.

We as a group have decided that for the sake of sparing ourselves the stress of having to announce and justify every single ban and judgement we make, that we simply won't. We maintain this game for free.

More often than not an admin can come into a round, run a gimmick that may or may not ruin the experience of the players without any say on the matter. Just because they are admins.

The game is free, we have a big disclaimer that says we can play with the round at basically any time. This is how we interact with the game because when we try to actually PLAY we get people treating us weird.

Compensation for these ruined rounds are very varied depending on the admin. Some will reward antag tokens, others will not with some arbitrary hidden rule about having ‘unspent tokens’.

Emily already addressed this but this isn’t untrue. I personally hand them out like candy, but I’d definitely be annoyed at someone already sitting on 8 demanding another. They could get 8 back to back rounds of being an antagonist. At some point we have to put our foot down.

It feels like nothing is done. It exists for show, so that there’s the option to write up a post and perhaps an illusion of being able to speak up when admins aren’t behaving properly, yet still little to no action is taken as far as we are aware because we rarely get any kind of information or feedback on the forum posts from admins other than the one involved with the complaint.

You can bet that we talk to and discuss every single admin feedback that shows up, in fact our discord bot pops up in our chat when we do get feedback, private or public. Not sure what else you want from here, as most end in “There is no issue here” or “This won’t happen again”.

This lack of transparency extends even into the code where we can find the Secret module. This module contains code that normal coders cant access, this includes Ranch code and Salvager code to name a few. And from the outside it seems that this module is mostly used for dev projects that they either; don’t want being public, or aren’t finished yet.

This is correct - you seem to misunderstand the purpose of the Secret submodule. This is where the devs put their personal projects they want to work on in their spare time without having them outright stolen by other servers. Coding isn’t cheap, Emily spent tens of hours of her spare time coding ranching, something she would have earned a lot of money for were it a paid job!

The handling of rule breaks applies the same way too, instead of a uniform or standardisation of punishments, one admin might just warn you the other might ban you for a week. Sometimes warnings are issued for rule breaks and sometimes they aren't, I understand that this is dependent on both the player and the admin involved and it's not just solely influenced by how the admin is feeling on one particular day. However it is odd to see people being granted leniency for major rulebreaks and others being banned for much less.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this, but if we ban someone for a rule break it’s generally an hour ban with “Read the rules and come back”. We are much more lenient to newer players and not so to people who rack up tens of notes in a month. The vast majority of players have one or two notes. If you keep popping up on our radar and being an issue, Occam’s razor dictates the easiest solution is to remove you from the community.

PR posts are also a victim of lack of transparency.

I don’t think I can reply to this properly being that I myself am not a developer - I’ll leave this point alone.

We see a stagnation of the game. Pop count is lower than usual, and while I think this is due to work and what not, possibly being a seasonal issue, I think certain aspects I’ve mentioned here might drive away players.

Pop comes and goes, it doesn’t look to be “stagnating” at all in my opinion.

There is a veritable fear of speaking out against the admins because a ban might be issued.

Rest assured that genuine discussion or issues will be taken seriously - We have a private admin feedback section after all.

We want to make the game better.

Me too. Sincerely. That's why I spent over an hour writing up a reply to this on my day off.